Why does your small business need a CRM?

Running a small business is never easy. Your small business environment is ever-changing, dynamic and challenging. Customers change and customer needs change.

To make life easy and to make work productive in this challenging environment, a small business needs tools for managing its business and operations. One such tool is Customer Relationship Management or simply CRM.

CRM is a great business tool if you’re striving to improve sales, quality of your service and customer interactions. Whether you generate and track new leads, want to fix your sales process or to retain existing customers, CRM systems can help you in optimizing all of these processes. Hence, all businesses, especially small businesses, need a CRM to grow the customer base and grow the business.

How can you benefit from a CRM as a small business?

• CRM helps to oil your sales funnel
• Marketing and sales teams get a full 360-degree view of customers and visibility into the entire sales funnel
• Get visibility by tracking each part of your sales process with a visual deal pipeline thus enabling you to forecast better.
• Qualify leads for better sales conversions
• Adapt a good process quickly for connecting with customers.
• Provide your team with task automation opportunities such as entering data and sending greeting or introductory emails by using a CRM

Things to look for in a small business CRM

Below is a quick list of key elements that a small business or SMB or Small and medium business – should look for when selecting a CRM software:

(1) Customization or Option to configure

Being small business, you are trying out new things, rather than following a guidebook. So, it is necessary that you should look for customization or configuration options so that you can modify the CRM software according to your specific business needs.

(2) Fairly Priced

SMBs or small businesses seeking CRM tools always looks for the most cost-efficient option. If your budget is low and you want to know the usefulness of the CRM tool, it is better to try with a free CRM. Hence, CRM solutions should meet the price point that you are comfortable with.

(3) Customer support

As a small business, you may not have your own IT department. Hence, making sure that CRM you choose is supported by a great support team for solving technical issues quickly is necessary.

Choosing the right CRM for your small business:

As a decision-maker in an organisation or as small business owner, choosing the right CRM system can be tricky and can be overwhelming. With so many CRM options, each with a different set of tools and features, identifying the right one for your small business is quite challenging. Here are few tips that will guide you in the right direction.

1. Defining the features you need

Be clear with what you need the CRM system to do for you. There are lots of different CRM software with many features to choose front. Before selecting a CRM, make sure what you need and make sure available features match your business needs.

2. Business growth

Small businesses grow quickly like babies. Whatever CRM system you choose, be sure it can scale with your business needs. It should be flexible enough to your changing business needs as your organization grows and evolves. Ability to scale is essential.

3. User Access & Roles

By choosing the right CRM system, you can allow marketing and sales team members to work off one platform. The more users you include, the better it is as all of them will have a common unified view of what is going on in sales.  Make sure the CRM you choose has roles and permissions. Not too many, but what is optimum.

4. Customer Support

Customer service distinguishes a good CRM from a bad one. As a small business owner, time is a premium commodity. A small business should be looking for a CRM that provides good customer support and multichannel communication.

5. Integration with marketing

Marketing is the heart of any business. A good CRM software should offer a perspective view of each lead, previous customers, and current customers. This can include their related data like demographics, contacts, margins, and products purchased. Such data can be utilized to provide well-structured marketing campaigns. This allows you to do things like building landing pages, email marketing, scoring, and qualifying leads, and running multichannel marketing campaigns.

Choosing the right CRM for your small and medium business can improve your team’s productivity and help in accelerating sales.